“You have to understand the whole experience of a Heathkit,” Nurse said. “It began with the catalog, which became part of my dreams and fantasies.” Once he had placed an order, he would count the days until his Heathkit box arrived at his home in New Jersey. “Finally you’d get the package in the post box, after all this anticipation.”

Electronics weren’t readily accessible in the 1950s. The only place Nurse could see electronic components was at a local TV repair shop, which he hung around. The Heathkit catalog opened a door to the new worlds of hi-fi components, electrical test equipment, ham radios, and television sets. His first build was a ham transmitter, the DX-40.

Nurse recalls the joy of opening up the Heathkit box. “First, you’d see the Heathkit manual, which was the heart of the kit.” Then he’d find the capacitors and resistors in brown envelopes. A transformer came wrapped in spongy paper, a predecessor of bubble wrap. “Before you did anything, you had to go through the errata that came with the kit.” Then he’d inventory the parts and sort them in a muffin tin.

“After all this waiting and preparation, you’d begin to assemble the parts,” he said. “You started by attaching a few components, and then you got to solder, which was really fun.” When you finished and tried it out, often it didn’t work. This, too, was part of the process of understanding electronics and learning to fix problems.

The TX-1 "Scratchy Apache" transmitter is still in use.

The Heathkit Company got its start in the 1920s as the Heath Aeroplane Company. Founder Eddie Heath developed do-it-yourself aircraft kits; his most famous was the Heath Parasol, with an overhead wing. Unfortunately, he was killed in 1931 in an airplane accident.

An engineer named Howard Anthony bought the company from Heath’s widow in 1935. After World War II, Anthony bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts, among them 5″ CRTs (the legend is that he ordered a case but a carload arrived). He designed an oscilloscope kit for $39.50 and began to sell it through mail order. It took ten years to go through the original CRT shipment. According to an excerpt from the Heathkit Catalog found on heathkit-museum.com, Anthony’s success was based on “the premise that anyone, regardless of technical knowledge or skills, could assemble a kit himself, and save up to 50% over comparable factory built models. All that would be required were a few simple hand tools and some spare time.”

In 1951, Anthony also died in an airplane crash. The company changed ownership several times, but continued to produce innovative kits, including a color TV set in 1964. Heathkit did $100 million in annual sales in the 70s on a wide variety of kits, including furniture and satellite TV receivers.

“The Heathkit philosophy,” said Nurse, “was that they didn’t invent new products; they looked for products that were already successful in the market,” then turned them into kits for the DIY market.

Nurse believes he may have had a role in persuading Heathkit to undertake its first digital computer. In 1975, the cover of Popular Electronics featured the MITS Altair 8800, which originally sold as a kit that required the user to solder and assemble the components. Noticing that it was selling well, he told his father that there should be a Heathkit computer. In 1977, Heathkit launched the H8 Digital Computer, and it proved to be extremely successful. Based on the Intel 8080, the H8 came with 4K of RAM and a cassette-tape-based operating system. It had a keypad on the front and a nine-digit display. Nurse wrote a radio Teletype software program for the H8 and started his own business selling it.

In the 80s, interest in DIY electronics declined, and the Heathkit Company stopped making kits. The old Heathkits live on as memorabilia exchanged on eBay, and in enthusiast websites and Yahoo! groups.

“I’ll bet that every engineer in this country over the age of 50 grew up building Heathkits,” said Nurse. “Heathkits were special. The best way I can explain it is,” and he paused. “A Heathkit had a soul.”

UPDATE: Heathkits are back!
In September 2011 Heathkit resumed selling kits for the DIYer. Look for new home electronics kits — Garage Parking Assistant, Wireless Swimming Pool Monitor — and soon, tube-driven audiophile gear and amateur radio kits. Visit heathkit.com.

-Dale Dougherty

Obsessed, I decided to leave my medical practice to devote more time to experimenting with my steppers (and to raising our young children). But my first demo underwhelmed my curious and concerned family and friends. Soon afterward, when my kids bugged me about Easter egg coloring, it hit me that I might be able to use steppers to draw precise, intricate designs on eggs. Within a couple of days, the first Egg-Bot was born.

In the years that followed, local companies like 3M were dumping all sorts of automation machinery and components onto the local scrap market, and I used some of this bounty to build more machines, all inspired by my Egg-Bot: a Dremel CNC engraver, a plasma cutting table, and a 3-axis router. I began making sculpture using these “studio machines” and later incorporated the machines themselves into kinetic artworks, like my 35-foot-tall Pipedream I, which uses solenoid valves to generate bubble patterns in the lobby of the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM).

The Egg-Bot had changed my life; now I was a professional artist, and I began teaching a robotics class at the SMM that used the Egg-Bot as a project. I knew it would make a great kit, so, long story short, with significant help from my son, Ben, and others, we brought 50 beta Egg-Bot kits to the 2009 Maker Faire in San Mateo. We sold half of them and won an Editors Choice blue ribbon, but honestly, the kit had problems, including a terrible solenoid pen up/down mechanism.

Fortunately, I met Lenore and Windell from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories at Maker Faire. I suggested collaborating on an Egg-Bot kit, and happily, they agreed soon afterwards. They brought their characteristic care, aesthetics, expertise, and hard work to the project, making a kit that was easy to use, cross-platform, affordable, and superbly documented. The first batch sold out in two days, and its popularity continues, which is tremendously gratifying to me.

-Bruce Shapiro

This kit includes the fiberglass chassis, all stepper and servomotors and other parts, and the fully assembled and tested USB motor driver board; you provide computer, egg, and pen. A deluxe kit adds shiny brass hardware

The finished project is fun to use: you lift it a half-inch above the table and drop it to “roll” the die. A piezoelectric buzzer senses the impact and triggers the circuit to generate a random number and illuminate the LEDs. Everyone I show it to smiles at the way it works.

The cube comes preprogrammed with a simple gradient, but there are a lot of fun, full-motion programs online, and of course you can write your own. To make the cube work, you’ll also need a Rainbowduino LED driver board ($20), which attaches to the cube to control the colors.

Now the ADK TinkerKit unleashes this potential with the new Arduino Mega ADK (also sold separately for $85), which interfaces with an Android device via a USB host, and a multitude of modules such as LEDs, relays, joysticks, potentiometers, touch and temperature sensors, and many more. One caveat: the documentation on how to work with this technology, which bridges the Arduino and Android environments, is still sparse, and working with this kit is not for the faint of heart.

MAKE Disclaimer: “Please use your TV-B-Gone for good and not evil (unless it’s funny, and even then we don’t necessarily condone it).”